Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday April 11, 2014 @05:57PM
from the burning-plasma-and-benjamins dept.

sciencehabit writes: "ITER, the international fusion experiment under construction in Cadarache, France, aims to prove that nuclear fusion is a viable power source by creating a 'burning plasma' that produces more energy than the machine itself consumes. Although that goal is at least 20 years away, ITER is already burning through money at a prodigious pace. The United States is only a minor partner in the project, which began construction in 2008. But the U.S. contribution to ITER will total $3.9 billion — roughly four times as much as originally estimated — according to a new cost estimate released yesterday. That is about $1.4 billion higher than a 2011 cost estimate, and the numbers are likely to intensify doubts among some members of Congress about continuing the U.S. involvement in the project."

I'm afraid that is naive. In the real world the figures are low-balled to get signatures knowing that once the commitments are made and the real figures are revealed backing out will be politically difficult for the funding parties.

This isn't the last cost bump either. There will be more as the years pass, each carefully calculated to be just feasible politically.

Right now they can get away with bigger bumps because Obama et al. have never seen a demand for money from Europe they weren't eager to cover.

I do a lot of work that is funded by the government, and that's the opposite to how it works.You have to budget for more than you think you'll need, because the government will never give you more than what was agreed on.

Contractors routinely soak [politico.com] the federal government for billions in overruns. You happen work for a peon outfit that lacks the leverage to get away with it. France et al. have a little more pull.

My wife is in research currently, and I was not to many years ago. You give them a number thats way low for cost, a number thats WAY high for return on investment, then... unforeseen things happen... inflation, unexpected difficulties (that you expected but didn't mention in the original proposal) and who can argue that those things don't happen... because you'll also run into actual things that you didn't expect that will raise the cost... and tha

Reality of projects budgets 101:If you give the correct high estimate, they won't give you the money.If you give the fake low estimate, they will give you the money and pay extra later on because they're already invested.Especially if budgets have to compete, they will most likely be too low.When budgets are that high, nobody controlling investments really has a grasp of the value of the money.

... Well, considering the US is a MINOR partner, they aren't in charge of 'the plan', which... is costing EVERYONE on the project more money than expected... well with the exception of the few countries that didn't lie about the expected cost of front... which is pretty much SOP for science these days.

You can't show me any research project of any size building something that has never before been built that stays on budget.

The intentionally low ball it so they can get funding, then use the 'well, we've a

$4B over 20 years is $200M/year -- does anyone in congress even track such a small amount of money? I bet that if a few congressmen looked under the couch cushions in their office they could find more money than that.

No, it's not. It is just that they can't rent hotel room to meet their hookers and keep their mistresses on staff [csmonitor.com].

How much is this really. As a comparison, our football stadium was supposed to cost $400 million in today's dollars. It actually cost closer to $600 million, also in today's dollars. About $350 million of that is paid by extorting fees from visitor to the city. I can't imagine how making visitors pay for something they have no use for makes, sense, but there it is.

This reminds me of people who complain about the $400 million cost to launch the Space Shuttle. The same amount of a high end movie. But what does a movie give us?

Yes, because I am sure it was Clinton herself that lost the files and no one else would have been capable of losing them if they were in charge...But dont let logic stop you from being completely asinine.

I've come to the conclusion that it's likely a scaling problem. IE once we can do continuous fusion(or at least pulse/'diesel' fusion fast enough for steady power), it'll be a matter that the energy costs will scale by the square, but power production will scale by the cube.

Going by the size of ITER, considering that many research nuclear reactors had generators hooked up to them but ITER has no provision to ever produce electricity, ITER isn't big enough.

One, we need the power. The greenies can take their country-wide windmill blanket and shove it up their ass. If you take offense that, then all birds and bats hate you, just so you know.

Two, we've got thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste witting all around the country right now. And we have no plan on what to do with it. New Mexico ain't taking it, and in the long run; that's probably for the best. The only thing that can be done with it

I'd forgotten that "new nukes burn up all existing waste" is the new "duck and cover". Reprocessing creates MORE waste (it's a fuel recovery process not a waste management one), just a different sort which actually lasts longer so we can't just ignore waste management. We'd be better off just managing the waste we have properly as well as building the best nukes for the job instead of pretending that it's part of a waste management system, especially since the best nukes for the job are going to be differe

But I'm a bit of a greenie myself, and I don't think we should leave some of this truly nasty stuff laying around.

And I didn't say "all"; yes there will always be some leftover, but you can get the volume down considerably. And yes some of the leftovers last longer, that's the point; the longer it lasts, the less radioactive it is.

No, the waste volume goes UP with reprocessing. You've been badly misled into thinking that reprocessing is a magic fix everything wand instead of a real way to recover fuel. I suggest you look out how it is done to undo the damage before you embarrass yourself more. Last I looked the web site for the facility at Harford (think that's how it's spelled) had a good description of how they make MOX fuel from old fuel rods.It helps i

I'm all for lofty science projects with a moderate likelihood of failure but it seems like every one of these large scale projects of late fail to live up to their promises, don't provide significant scientific information AND cost 4 times what they were originally projected to cost. One of those conditions every other project would be quite acceptable but all three of them on a vast majority of projects? Sounds like either a massive waste of taxpayer money or a "legalized" form of embezzlement to me.

Well, it shouldn't be a question of some random person pulled of the Internet vs. the scientists *working on the project*. It should be a matter of what an educated person would think if all the pros and cons were laid out impartially then intelligently explained to him.

The problem with GP isn't that he thinks that ITER is a "massive and pointless waste of money" that will "never lead to a practical source of energy." The problem is that he hasn't explained the reasoning he used to arrive at that conclu

"End all involvement. This is a massive and pointless waste of money. It will never lead to any practical source of energy.""I'm so glad you're smarter than all the scientists working on it."

Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But he's still right.

There are two definitions of "working" one needs to consider. One is "this device fulfills a minimum technical requirement". The other is "this devices works, and is economically attractive". It is very clear to everyone involved, including "the scientists working on it"

On the other hand, how does $3.9B over 6 years compare to the annual cost of securing US fossil energy sources?

It doesn't even compare.

For example, the cost of running the air conditioners in the tents in Afghanistan is $20 billion *per year*. So, if the US just pulled out of Afghanistan a few weeks ahead of schedule, they could fully fund their minuscule contribution to ITER.

Huh? That is so wrong and your understanding of physics so little that I can't even begin to frame a rebuttal within your intelligence level. But maybe there is another way to tell you.. ever heard of the Hydrogen bomb? That's proof right there that fusion can release net energy. Up to 50 MEGATONS of proof courtesy of the Tsar Bomba.

We are making steady progress towards net energy in a controlled setting.. now if there was a stall.. maybe you have a point but we have made steady progress towards achievin

Well, the example was the Sun, not the hydrogen bomb. And btw, most of the boom in a hydrogen bomb comes from fission.

But let's look at the net power produced from that bomb. It was one of the cleaner, more fusiony bombs ever set off. Around half it's power came from fusion, iirc?

So start with the energy required for the farms to feed the thousands (or even hundreds) of workers that built that bomb. How much effort and power went into refining the uranium and deuterium or lithium or I forget what they used

The efficiency of fusion power doesn't come from anything as trivial as the energy used to grow food or refine the fuel. Fusion power derives its energy from the strong nuclear force. This energy density is already present in each atom of your fuel.

When you start fusing atoms and releasing the energy from those reactions it starts going well beyond "well, it cost us x amount of energy in the truck to bring the fuel to the reactor". Th

The boom in the Tsar Bomba was 99% from fusion. In the standard nuke employed by the US, a large portion of the boom is from fission, as you say. Most of that is from secondary fission from parts of the casing after the fusion stage blows. The Tsar bomba was so clean because it was intentionally designed with non-fissionable materials in the casing to avoid secondary fission so that fallout from it wouldn't rain down all over the Soviet Union. Even if it hadn't, the boom still would have been almost entirel

All that gravity counts as power. There is no net power gain in the Sun's 'working'.

I think you misunderstand the laws of thermodynamics.

The sun converts mass into energy at an enormous rate. There is no "net power gain" in any closed thermodynamic system, but from the reference frame of the earth, the sun "makes power" insofar as it takes the fuel it has in the core and fuses it, and as a helpful side effect it the energy released in said fuel consumption is released as heat, light and other EM radiation.

I'm pretty sure that the poster you're responding to is an Electric Universe proponent. Don't bother. They firmly understand Maxwell's equations and that Maxwell's equations are the only important equations in physics.

It's similar to saying nukes are a proof that you can make nuclear reactors.It's kinda wrong, but it points out that once you know a way to release a massive amount of energy, the next step is to find a confinement to release it in a controlled and safe manner.

We know, at the fundamental level, that we have the math, techniques and materials to initiate the release of energy. There is no indication that we can't contain and channel it with current or future techniques.

The ITER is designed to do more than "break even", it's expected to return 10 times the energy input for heating and controlling the plasma -- a return of 500MW for an input of 50MW and to sustain this for periods of thousands of seconds. This is just heat, not electricity, there's no plans to try and extract energy from the system yet. It's an experimental platform, not a prototype power generating system.

Whether ITER succeeds in this aim we won't know until it actually runs. One school of thought is that bigger tokamaks make it easier to control the plasma generated. Pessimists think more problems will crop up as the engineering scale increases. That's why they're building it, to find out.

This is just heat, not electricity, there's no plans to try and extract energy from the system yet.

Ok, so no energy extracted from system for anything even remotely useful, even as a demonstration? That is break even.

It's an experimental platform, not a prototype power generating system.

Then it's vastly overpriced. The value is in it as a prototype. You could get the experimental platform for a couple of orders of magnitude less money. You might even be able to get that and the alleged prototype which can return ten times its power input for less than what is spent on ITER.

Whether ITER succeeds in this aim we won't know until it actually runs.

Except that we already know it is vastly overpriced for the things it is supposed to do. It is priced

"You could get the experimental platform for a couple of orders of magnitude less money."

No you couldn't, demonstrably. If they could build an ITER-scale reactor for one-hundredth the price they would have. Large-scale sustainable high-Q fusion is difficult. It cost billions to build and operate JET and it was never meant to beat breakeven (Q > 1) but it's come the closest to that of any of the major tokamaks with a couple of seconds of fusion with a Q of about 0.6 back in the 1990s. Heck JET wasn't even built specifically to do fusion, it was mainly supposed to be for plasma research but it got repurposed as plasma control and generation techniques improved. ITER, if it works as planned and the physicists haven't dropped a decimal point here or there, is a fusion reactor which will eventually run with Q >= 10 for several thousand seconds at a time. Maybe.

The "E" in ITER stands for Experimental. It's a testbed platform for trying out stuff and seeing how it breaks, a rig to make mistakes on and gain knowledge. There are nebulous plans to build DEMO and the later PROTO which will be power generating fusion reactors but they'll still be less than fully-commercial designs, just another step closer to the rollout of workable and cost-effective fusion power generation. Nothing is guaranteed though.

No you couldn't, demonstrably. If they could build an ITER-scale reactor for one-hundredth the price they would have.

Nobody is bothering is not the same thing as nobody can't. My experience has been that publicly funded R&D is vastly more expensive than it can be. And something like ITER doesn't contain costs even within an order of magnitude of a normal publicly funded R&D project.

There are nebulous plans to build DEMO and the later PROTO which will be power generating fusion reactors but they'll still be less than fully-commercial designs, just another step closer to the rollout of workable and cost-effective fusion power generation.

I believe these projects will never be in the ancestry of a practical commercial fusion power plant. The approach is too flawed by its nature to work. As I wrote here [slashdot.org], the three flaws with this sort of research. The government project d

It is an absolute disgrace that fusion power hasn't seen the funding necessary to succeed given the importance of energy to modern civilisation.

ITER is a necessary step in the chain to produce working fusion power plants. It's amazing they've come this far while being funded with what amounts to hunting for pennies in vending machine coin return trays.

Here's a picture that paints a thousand words that makes the laughable troll headline of "skyrocketing" cost for ITER make the idiot who wrote it seem like he has trouble tying his own shoes:

Where's the evidence? All I see are the usual white elephant projects.

Here's a picture that paints a thousand words that makes the laughable troll headline of "skyrocketing" cost for ITER make the idiot who wrote it seem like he has trouble tying his own shoes:

That picture is pulled out of someone's ass. Those curves have no meaning. The assumption is that if we magically spent that kind of money, we'd have viable fusion. I see no reason, given what actually happened and given the US's consistent fumbling with similar scale R&D to believe that. That black line is more than ample, if fusion researchers were at all serious about developing fusion power.

Also note the scale on the y axis, and remember that the annual cost of the air conditioning the troops in Afghanistan is $20 billion.

The evidence is the amount of money that has been spent on that research - it's a tiny drop.

Large scale research projects are required to probe science at this level - look at the development of fission reactors, for example. The money poured into that was vast, and it cracked the fundamental engineering problems associated with it.

Fusion power is not a theoretical concept - it happens all the time (and life on earth is reliant on it), but the practical challenges are large. The lines on that graph are obvi

The evidence is the amount of money that has been spent on that research - it's a tiny drop.

We could of course spend one or two orders of magnitude more on fusion power. But what would we get as a result? From what I see for current fusion power and for similar scaled R&D, the result is that we would burn more money.

You keep referring to that graph like it shows something.

Solving fusion power

Takes more than money. It takes someone focused on making it happen in an economical fashion rather than just doing R&D for a few decades or centuries.

The worst part is we could have already solved it by now had we actually spent any reasonable amount of money on it.

I see you have absolutely no understanding of how science works, or have any understanding of the current state of research into fusion power, if you suggest that we could have had it already based on the money spent so far.

If we'd have spent two orders of magnitude more money on it over the past 40 years then that's still less than a year's expenditure on oil surveying by a single oil company.

Bargain.

So, given how you're clearly an expert on these sorts of things, how much should we be spending on cryogeni

I see you have absolutely no understanding of how science works, or have any understanding of the current state of research into fusion power, if you suggest that we could have had it already based on the money spent so far.

Opportunity cost is invisible. But the fusion research community didn't do much with the opportunities they had.

If we'd have spent two orders of magnitude more money on it over the past 40 years then that's still less than a year's expenditure on oil surveying by a single oil company.

I don't get what you think oil companies earn here. Just by the US (not counting the considerable expenditures by the rest of the world), fusion research has spent over $20 billion [focusfusion.org] (not adjusted for inflation). Do you seriously think that a single oil company can casually burn $2 trillion on just looking for oil? That's probably enough money to completely replace a good portion of the current oil

Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.

Well, of course, you can always make the problem worse (three orders of magnitude is the next step up this particular ladder). But if you were trying to say that the cheaper approach isn't actually cheaper, then you picked a mighty peculiar way of trying.

Also, I actually have experience with a project that did something for less than a government funded project by at least three orders

Production models of cars are made on a production line and crancked out in an efficient process. To make a completely new model of car with a new engine and everything else from scratch requires you to first build the whole damn factory.

ITER will do absolutely nothing to develop this alleged assembly line for fusion power plants. We can stop wasting our time with this. Second, a prototype is not production infrastructure. If you're spending money on the order of building the production infrastructure just to build a car, you're doing it wrong.

ITER is not a prototype powerpland it's a vast R&D science experiment facility. It is and always be a completely unique one-off testing a variety of new technologies.

In other words, ITER is useless or even actively harmful to us because it is pulling money, effort, and resources (like very skilled and very scarce labor) from valid fusion development needs and dump

To the contrary, it's there, it's just not scaled up to the level where it'd be break even. The whole point of ITER should be to do that in a cost-effective manner not to find a way to burn several tens of billions of dollars.

Also, ITER is in fact a large portion of the global fusion research budget. Almost no one is building or even designing serious experiments right now, as most effort is going into ITER.

Currently. It wasn't in the past, and it won't be after it ends. Just because ITER gets a bigger budget presently doesn't actually mean much. Research value isn't proportional to funding. Those other projects are about as useful as ITER for a fraction the cost such as the Polywell reac

Typical development costs for a car are on the order of about a billion dollars. More than the the $650 million for ITER.A total cost of $65 billion over six years is about $11 billion a year. To actually refine a working fusion reactor, that would be a bargain.

Typical development costs for a car are on the order of about a billion dollars.

So we're going to make a hundred thousand fusion reactors? First, we're speaking of prototypes not tooling an industrial factory or running a supply chain. If car makers were actually making billion dollar prototypes, then they would be doing it wrong.

A total cost of $65 billion over six years is about $11 billion a year. To actually refine a working fusion reactor, that would be a bargain.

One can make a working fusion reactor on a table for a few thousand dollars, maybe less. There are two conflicting demands on ITER which should have been factored out. First, the research into large scale fusion phenomena. They could have done that with a very

No, but that doesn't magically make the development costs cheaper than a well-understood consumer machine of which literally billions have been mass-produced.

A prototype would only be a portion of the development costs. The private world would foot most of the bill, assuming that economically viable fusion reactors were demonstrated.

The millenium dome is 52 meters high on the inside and cost a more than a billion dollars and it's basically a giant tent. NASA's Space Power Facility is more the sort of thing you would need for a giant Farnsworth fusor. It's still only about forty meters high. I can't find exact costs for it, but I can guaranty it wasn't cheap and it's only a small fraction of the scale you're talking about.

These are prestige projects. They wouldn't build them, if the design were cheap. Another example, is the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center [wikipedia.org] in Astana, Kazakhstan. It's a 150m high tent structure which supposedly cost $400 million to produce.

This is what they're already building. I personally think it would be great if they could find the budget for a few different approaches.

This brings up an important point. The primary purpose of ITER is to immunize 34 national gover

A prototype would only be a portion of the development costs. The private world would foot most of the bill, assuming that economically viable fusion reactors were demonstrated.

Which is what ITER is supposed to do. Demonstrate that it's possible to make a commercially viable fusion reactor and work out the problems involved in actually doing that.

These are prestige projects. They wouldn't build them, if the design were cheap. Another example, is the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center [wikipedia.org] in Astana, Kazakhstan. It's a 150m high tent structure which supposedly cost $400 million to produce.

But the point is that these structures are essentially _tents_ and they're a small fraction of the size of the "very large Farnsworth fusor or polywell device, say hundreds of meters in diameter and a few modest free-electron lasers to illuminate portions of the fusing plasma" that you suggested and are still very, very expensive. The con

And my point is that these are essentially status projects. Well, the NASA one is a reused status project. Spending a lot more money than you have to is part of the project.

The same goes for pyramid shaped objects. Nobody builds a cheap pyramid just because even though it'd be relatively easy to do with a few earthmovers and other massive construction equipment. It's, for example, a place of worship, monument to your life, and/or a giant casino. Using historical examples for price estimates would give so

And my point is that these are essentially status projects. Well, the NASA one is a reused status project. Spending a lot more money than you have to is part of the project.

Which NASA project? Are you talking about the Space Power Facility? That's not a prestige project, that's a giant bell jar with really good vacuum pumps. Even though it looks cool enough to be used as a movie prop/set, it's very utilitarian. As for those giant tents, they may be prestige projects, but that doesn't really mean anything. Large utilitarian projects intended as nuclear experiment stations also are built at a premium because they're meant to be built to very high standards.

For example, I believe an inflatable structure of the appropriate scale with a medium vacuum in the center and properly anchored to the ground (or perhaps rather the inside of an abandoned open copper mine) could be had for low tens of millions of dollars (the inflatable components of the outer shell would be moderately over-pressurized cone-shaped wedges which would need to resist one atmosphere of pressure and wind loading with appropriate factor of safety). That includes building of smaller structures to get the many design issues worked out. That's not quite good enough a vacuum, but it's getting there.

If you're going to build a truly massive vacuum chamber on the cheap, then you can probably build it somewhere like Fall River Pass in Colorado so that you only have to hold off.65 Atmospheres of pressure, although I don't know if there are any suitable pre-existing depressions around there that you can use. Honestly, your plan sounds pretty neat and is probably practical. The problem is that inflatable vacuum chambers are still a pretty novel technology. So, you would be basing one highly experimental project on another highly experimental project.

The space experiment is also an interesting idea. I personally wish we lived in an environment where this kind of research could be done, with the recognition that the potential returns are vast. That's not what we get however. We're lucky to get ITER and they're already grumbling about the cost and fudging the numbers to try to kill support. After all, this whole article is a sensationalist bit trying to claim that the actual cost of ITER has gone way up when, if you read it, it's evident that what's really happening is that the long-term cost is going up because they're not shelling out the money in the short term.

That's not a prestige project, that's a giant bell jar with really good vacuum pumps.

It started life as a status project. Sure, that's a sunk cost now, but someone burned a lot of money in the past on it which biases it as a model for our attempts to price similar scale projects now.

As for those giant tents, they may be prestige projects, but that doesn't really mean anything.

It means that the sponsor isn't particularly concerned about cost which is a strong bias upward in cost estimates for such projects.

If you're going to build a truly massive vacuum chamber on the cheap, then you can probably build it somewhere like Fall River Pass in Colorado so that you only have to hold off.65 Atmospheres of pressure, although I don't know if there are any suitable pre-existing depressions around there that you can use. Honestly, your plan sounds pretty neat and is probably practical. The problem is that inflatable vacuum chambers are still a pretty novel technology. So, you would be basing one highly experimental project on another highly experimental project.

Those other necessary highly experimental projects would be part of the cost and it wouldn't be just one such project. Some would be at a scale capable of being fit into a large gar

While we are at it there are more facts.
1. Never shown a breading ratio of 1.
2. Never done in situ reprocessing.
3. Not been shown to be cost effective.
4.Can never "fail" or break or whatever is clearly BS. There is no never. There is only mitigate risk.

A demo plant needs to be built which is 10 years at best, and quite a few billion+cost overruns. To validate the design it need to be run for a while tracking things like corrosion e

India seem to be doing it on that sort of budget.Oh you mean in the US - no that would challenge established uranium interests so unlikely to happen with any budget unless the military are firmly behind it and can tell the nuclear lobby rent seekers to fuck off.

It would take 40 billion to do it the GE / Westinghouse / Areva / Hitachi way of doing (the complete opposite of the startup way).There is already a credible effort to produce a DMSR (KISS version of the Thorium LFTR) in Canada. Terrestrial Energy Inc, Dr. David LeBlanc is working on this. They already have the funding for the next year's work. And due to the far more sane Canadian version of the NRC regulation, they are promising to have the first DMSR in commercial operation in 10 years.Lookup DMSR (denat

These things are not mutually exclusive. Most of the proponents of nuclear power recognize it as an interim step - something a lot less dirty than fossil fuels, but still not the goal. We would need to be doing the fusion research regardless.

I'm against funding fusion because it's not really meant to work. It's meant to be a glimmer of hope to take the heat away from coal and gasoline burning, a way to tell the public "we have the future covered".If the government was even half serious about cheap nuclear energy, they would have reinstated molten salt research back in the 80s when most knowledge base on the subject was still alive (versus today where all experts from the 60s and 70s are either dead or too old to work on this). The reality is th

No "they" didn't have a LFTR reactor working in the 70s. Nobody's EVER had an LFTR working. There is no liquid-fluorine thorium Santa Claus, just a lot of grad student Powerpoint presentations.

There was a molten-salt reactor, a laboratory-scale device fuelled with U-233 and later U-235 in intermittent operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratories for a few years in the 1960s. It never used thorium and wouldn't have been any good if it had because it couldn't breed thorium up into U-233 to fission for energy. It took a long time to decommission this small reactor in part as several bad things had happened to the piping inside it. Folks reckon the corrosion could have been fixed with a little tweak but you don't get to "tweak" sizeable reactors. Chernobyl 4 is a worked example of "tweaking" a large reactor.

China might sell you their CAP1400 light-water reactor design (an upgrade of the Westinghouse AP1000) or maybe their HTR-PM modular reactors; they're actually building one at the moment to test the concept and they have a small testbed gas-cooled pebble-bed reactor running at the moment. India is working on using thorium in regular heavy-water reactors as part of the fuel mix, not in molten-salt systems and nobody else is really interested in buying into what they're doing. Other folks are looking into pebble-bed reactors which can burn thorium as part of the fuel mix but the previous history of attempting this is not a success, mostly -- the Germans are still trying to figure out how to decommission their thorium-mix pebble-bed reactors. They've been filled with concrete for the moment to stop the leaks of radioactivity.

There are also experiments going on to see how thorium works in regular light-water reactors. The physics says it will work, it's not as energetic as regular uranium fuels though. Baby steps baby steps.

No "they" didn't have a LFTR reactor working in the 70s. Nobody's EVER had an LFTR working. There is no liquid-fluorine thorium Santa Claus, just a lot of grad student Powerpoint presentations.

Thank you for calling the Thorium hotline. YES THERE IS A THORIUM SANTA CLAUS! I've ridden on his sleigh, he even let me ring the jingle bells. Even if you are a sourpuss you are welcome to come along for a ride too: the Thorium Remix 2011 [youtube.com]. It's two hours long so bring some snacks.

I grew up amid Cold War fear and graduated to fossil fuel angst, coal concern. Then over the years I have witnessed a parade of 'renewable' wind and solar energy farm dreams where an absurd complexity of grid interconnect, tiny

Like I said, nobody's ever run a thorium-cycle liquid-salt reactor and there is no Santa Claus. As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more, mindbogglingly radioactive, radiochemically very complex and being continuously moved around lots of piping and heat exchangers and chemical processing plant and it has to generate electricity at about 5 cents per kWh to be competitive.

Any such reactor is going to require a neutron flux way higher than the ORNL reactor ever experienced, a mix of fast neutrons to do the breeding and slower neutrons to fission the resulting U-233. This isn't a problem for existing well-tested light-water and heavy-water reactors delivering about 15% of the world's electricity demand right now, of course. In their case the ceramic fuel sits in zirconium tubes and water circulates around them to transfer heat and in some cases moderate the neutron flux, no fast neutrons specifically required for breeding purposes (although some breeding does happen anyway). Much simpler and more reliable, no explosives required.

I agree that uranium will not be scarce for decades, at least one conventional and proven light-water/heavy-water reactor operation cycle of about 60 years. It's possible it would never be scarce at all if the process to extract from seawater can be operated commercially -- it's been tested, its cost is estimated at about three or four times the price of conventionally mined uranium today. Some countries don't have much uranium within their boundaries so ongoing supply is not guaranteed. India is one such country hence their interest in developing a fuel cycle involving thorium for their heavy-water reactors. They're still building and operating conventionally-fueled reactors too though.

As for a "thorium breeder blanket" add-on to the Oak Ridge reactor, huh? The LFTR concept mixes thorium into the molten-salt stream, breeds it up to U-233 and then fissions it within a moderator to slow down the neutron flux. There is no separate blanket, it's all in one stream, salt, kickstarter fuel (U-233 or U-235/Pu-239), thorium and waste products all at 700 deg C and more,

There is no single LFTR concept. When you say there is no separate blanket you seem to be describing a one-fluid design. Weinberg's MSRE [wikipedia.org] was never intended as such, it was a first stage in the development of a two-fluid Thorium breeder where a separate loop of fertile Thorium within the core breeds. The two-fluid design was envisioned by Weinberg as a best-fit solution to the management of long term waste products. I believe this is still true today.

Generally we've discovered that very high neutron fluxes (thermal, fast or a mixture of the two) in restricted volumes required for high levels of breeding in reactors and the attendant high temperatures tend to break things, cause leaks and fires and expensive shutdowns. At the same time reactors that work on the basis of moving fuel around (mostly pebble-bed designs) have not had a happy time of it even with lower neutron fluxes and larger working volumes in the core compared to out-and-out breeder design

Light-water, heavy-water and carbon moderated power reactors only breed U238 up into Pu239 and Pu240 by "accident", so to speak. They get a few percent of the total energy they produce from fissioning these products in-situ. Breeders meant to produce surplus fuel or "burn" waste require much higher fluxes, usually achieved in a small physical volume hence the higher temperatures involved and the use of sodium, lead/bismuth, helium etc. to conduct away the heat. The LFTR concept requires this high flux densi

Thorium is not Uranium. 232Th absorbs a neutron in the thermal spectrum where it has a high cross section, decays to 233Pa which then decays to 233U with about a 30 day half life IIRC. That is one of the advantages of a Thorium fuel cycle. No need for fast neutrons to get a breading ratio of 1.

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors are a "breeder reactor", as in they produce more U-233 from Th-232 than they consume.U-238 -> Pu-239 fast breeders are trouble, because of the Sodium, because of the fast neutrons wreaking havoc inside the reactor, and because Plutonium is probably an even dirtier word than nuclear in the minds of the general population.If Fast Breeders were a good idea, Russia would be filled with them. They have been operating a few for almost 40 years. If they were economical, they wou

Then why is GE still proposing a Sodium cooled fast reactor instead of a Lead one ?How many civilian lead cooled reactors in operation in Russia and former USSR states ?Just because something works well for subs doesn't mean they are great for civilian needs.

If something was designed for military needs, gets no respect from me, cause it's the same reason we're mostly stuck with LWR and AHWR reactors.

Awareness that we got the light water reactor exactly because it was the solution decided upon for military u

The limited molten salt reactor research was conducted for military interests (nuclear powered bomber in the 60s). After ICBMs were perfected USAF lost interest in bombers capable of staying in the air for weeks. Oak Ridge National labs managed to get a few more years of molten salt research funding, eventually running a 5MW research reactor for 22000 hours. But since Thorium doesn't produce plutonium, U-233 is bad for bombs and the political interest was in plutonium fast breeders, funding was cancelled

We'd have the money if we'd kick the trailer trash and hood rats off of welfare and sent the illegals back to their shithole country.

http://uptownmagazine.com/2014... [uptownmagazine.com]
Be careful who you kick and where you kick them. This guy might actually figure out fusion energy - eh? This dude is why we have welfare. When you mine for gold there is mostly dirt...but there's gold too. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And a penny saved is a penny earned. And make yourself a bowl of soup and wrap a hot towel around your head. And don't stay out too late!
Ah, whatever.

Proponents of advanced fission products state that advanced fission will be a hundred times safer than current fission (which is already arguably the safest energy source available).The are asking for a pawty 2 billion USD not for research, but to engineer a proof of concept Thorium Fluoride Molten Salt Reactor (LFTR), including the cost to actually startup a mass production line.They state there is zero research involved. Its strictly development/engineering of well understood engineering challenges, mostl

If you are only interested in criticizing then for you it's just videos on you tube.There are many more resources. But since you are clearly not interested in studying the available materials and producing a consistent criticism of the vision around molten salt reactors, I don't see much of any point in trying to debate with you.I'll reply solely for other's to understand why you are soooo wrong.

There are discussion forums.And even many of the videos on you tube are deeply technical. If you aren't intereste